Regulating Uber: The Politics of the Platform Economy in Europe and the United States

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Abstract

I use the case of the transportation network company Uber as a lens to explore the comparative politics of the platform economy in Europe and the United States. Within the advanced capitalist world, different countries have responded in very different ways to this new service, from welcome embrace and accommodating regulatory adjustments to complete rejection and legal bans. I analyze Uber’s arrival and reception in the United States, Germany, and Sweden, documenting three very different responses to this disruptive new actor. I show that conflicts over Uber centered on different issues in the three countries. These differences were consequential because the specific regulatory “flashpoints”that Uber provoked mobilized different actors, inspired the formation of different coalitions, and shaped the terms on which conflicts over Uber were framed and fought.

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Most cited references 11

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Platform capitalism: The intermediation and capitalization of digital economic circulation

Paul Langley, Andrew Leyshon (2017)

A new form of digital economic circulation has emerged, wherein ideas, knowledge, labour and use rights for otherwise idle assets move between geographically distributed but connected and interactive online communities. Such circulation is apparent across a number of digital economic ecologies, including social media, online marketplaces, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and other manifestations of the so-called ‘sharing economy’. Prevailing accounts deploy concepts such as ‘co-production’, ‘prosumption’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ to explain digital economic circulation as networked exchange relations characterised by their disintermediated, collaborative and democratising qualities. Building from the neologism of platform capitalism, we place ‘the platform’ – understood as a distinct mode of socio-technical intermediary and business arrangement that is incorporated into wider processes of capitalisation – at the centre of the critical analysis of digital economic circulation. To create multi-sided markets and coordinate network effects, platforms enrol users through a participatory economic culture and mobilise code and data analytics to compose immanent infrastructures. Platform intermediation is also nested in the ex-post construction of a replicable business model. Prioritising rapid up-scaling and extracting revenues from circulations and associated data trails, the model performs the structure of venture capital investment which capitalises on the potential of platforms to realise monopoly rents.

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Workers without employers: shadow corporations and the rise of the gig economy

Gerald Friedman (2014)

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Peter Swenson (2002)

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Author and article information

Journal

Title: Perspectives on Politics

Abbreviated Title: Perspect. polit.

Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)

ISSN (Print): 1537-5927

ISSN (Electronic): 1541-0986

Publication date Created: December 2018

Publication date (Electronic): November 23 2018

Publication date (Print): December 2018

Volume: 16

Issue: 4

Pages: 938-953

Article

DOI: 10.1017/S1537592718001081

SO-VID: f035cc22-eb4f-436d-8312-b55cbabae169

License:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms

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